SocialEngine 4 Information

We’ve developed SE4 with the primary goals of improving SE3’s customizability and extensibility. SE4 will not only be a turnkey white-label social network, but also a broadly-applicable social content platform in its own right.

The platform will be designed with a high level of modularity so that third-party plugins, skins, and other custom scripts can be easily implemented and adjusted. Internal scripts and templates will be highly granular to avoid upgrade conflict issues. SE4 will also be substantially more accessible (especially for mobile devices) thanks to thorough HTML4 standards compliance and fluid, div-based layouts. To improve extensibility/scalability, we’ve re-written the SE core on top of the highly-acclaimed Zend framework, which carries substantial documentation and a very active developer community with it.

While development is now underway, we do not yet have a set deadline for a public beta. This will be announced as soon as our development team has set one. We will directly contact every third-party developer currently listed on our third-party mods page when a beta is available so that they can begin upgrading their products.

Here is a tentative feature list for SE4:

Improved activity feed with member photos, in-feed posting and comments

HTML4 standards-compliant layout for increased accessibility

Renovated default skin with new, cleaner look

Built-in profile picture cropping tool

Automatic detection of locale & date/time from member’s browser

Users can belong to multiple networks (i.e. sub-networks)

Network affiliation is now shown more visibly on members’ profiles and in search results by default

Members can search for each other geographically (if geo-fields have been created by admin)

Redundant fields (those that appear for multiple member types) now combined into “global fields”

Removed constraint on maximum number of profile fields

From this point forward, we will strive to be as transparent as possible about the upcoming development cycle and release. However, please keep questions about SE4 to a minimum at this point as we are focusing all of our efforts on development. Again, thank you all for your continued support and enthusiasm for SocialEngine!

From a personal standpoint I would appreciate SE V4 being available as soon as possible to minimise redundancy in the modifications I am making to SE v3.17. From this perspective I would welcome a staged release focusing primarily on the user interface and DB/framework, followed by the additional admin and sub-network functionality. The sooner we can all start getting used to the V4 functionality, the better.

Would there be an opportunity for a 'limited' private beta run using real customers (with a decent understanding of PHP, HTML, Java) to use the initial version in anger? i.e. those people who wouldn't mind finding a few bugs and therefore contributing (positively) to its early stability.

You obviously need to be comfortable with the integrity of the release, so I would rather you take your time and get it right. But please be quick..

Those of us growing a significantly-sized social community would also welcome some benchmark statistics (compared with v3.17) with relevant information on server configuration.

Although this is minor and I dont know if u've done this already but if u've not please try and make activity feed say something like "Anderson commented on his picture" instead of Anderson commented on Anderson's picture"

Its Look Great But i want to tell the se team on can we backup our database and file from admin panel the it will be some more good for that new users and buy who much no about it. I Hope the SE Team is understand what i tell.

Very Important because im tired of taking many hours all the time that i update de Core, because all my mods. right now im on 3.15 and thinking a lot to change to 3.17 but that eternal move my modifications, I hear that you will do some big changes to we can upgrade without loose all that but my question because you will change DB from what version of SE will be possible the upgrade to Ver 4 ? in that way i can wait for next released.

I'm hopeful that search will have a robust API that lets third party devs integrate their data into the result set so that an SE 4 site feels like a cohesive whole instead of a collection of loosely integrated pieces.

Looking forward to the new release. IMHO what will make or break socialengine is how much we can do with groups. Groups are the core functionality that can set one network apart from the rest. The more group members can interact with each other, set up their own wikis and documents, calendars, a group "home page" and selectively publish group content to the river and via admin to the main front page, the more people will buy socialengine. The focus regarding the entire development should be to create a more adult, business oriented approach. Kids spend a lot of time with their profile, adults spend their time in groups interacting with like-minded peers.
Secondly, multi-user video chat is badly needed out of the box to stay ahead of the curve. My users are becoming more demanding by the day. We have to push the envelope to stay competitive.

Thats great to read this news.. but i've an idea about new version.. would the theme installing like joomla in the new version? or could we use multi-themes, for example 3-5 themes in the same time ? if we could then this version will be PERFECT

I like Robert's point. Focus on Groups and group interactivity. Too many Social networks focus on single user's profile. Group interactivity and how well they interact with each other is the new wave in social network. For the multi user video chat i dont expect to see that soon in SE. That may have to be a 3rd party module. What i would like to see and i will pay for are SE customizeable apps for iphone and android. We jus customise it to match our website and its settings and then we publish it to iphone store and android market. Thanks.

Please improve SE speed and performance, and allow it to scale to the maximum level in order to handle thousands and even millions of traffic and members, and please focus on the server performance and scalability. Many of us will be running some extremely high-traffic social networks, and performance is our number 1 concern.

On the other hand, please tighten and tweak the security of the script to the maximum level, and finally please try to bring the best features available in third-party mods and integrate them in this new version. This does not mean that will no longer purchase third-party mods, but many important features are missing in SE and should be available in its core.

Waiting for more details and hopefully a demo. I have put all development on my site on hold as it sounds like v3 plugins will not be compatable. Please keep the v4 updates comming. We would also appreciate any news from SE developers about what to expect when we upgrade.

Hi,
I also want to know if you can install the product from scratch with all the mods you bought from SE. But I would like to keep the users base. Please make sure if we upgrade, we should be able to keep the existing users, i do not care about the mods if I can reinstall them later. That will be great for so many site owners who wants to start fresh with existing users. Thanks

I would like to hear more about how you're going to upgrade the plugins to be compatible with the new version. Especially the Forums / Blogs / Groups plugins. I hope the forums especially will be a major upgrade with extensive changes and additions to functionality.

A more advanced ad placement system would also be great addition. would love to see an ad system sumilar to the other social networks where admin can place small advertisements the boxes on side columns.

Can't wait till SE 4 comes out. In the meantime more information about the release date and new features would be very much appreciated.
I need to work on many things that require customization – all based on SE 3.17, and was just wondering if I should wait till SE 4 comes out. But if I know it'll be another 3-4 months before the first release; I'll just continue to work with 3.17 for now.
I'm sure that many of us who use SE find themselves in a similar situation.

I bought this script in an early stadge and then we got into some major work and the WWW got set on hold. Now almost a year later we still havent launched our site with SE and we are about to – but I see with this new version there wont be a pain in updating, there wont be a pain to redesign and rethink.

This might jsut be the best this month for me
But … Is SE4 set to be released this year or next year? How far are we from actually updating the licinse to V4?

Perhaps it's not what others are looking for but I think everyone should be able to search for events, members, etc. by radius (50mi from zip 06762)

In addition I was disappointed how I wasn't easily able to edit the layout and design. Perhaps I just need to read up on how to edit templates. HTML and PHP are easy to edit but the template system messes me up. Is there an easy way to edit the colors, layout?